Readers, Would You Care to Contribute Digital Preservation Web-based Resources?

While I was exploring the new National Archives and Records Administration Transcription Pilot Project this week, I thought about how many innovative, and frankly cool, crowdsourcing platforms the libraries and archives communities launched in the past year. The New York Public Library What’s on the Menu project, the NARA Citizen Archivist Dashboard, The University of Iowa Libraries Civil War Diaries Transcription Project  (which Trevor Owens blogged about last month), and Finland’s DigitalKoot project  are just a few of these websites.

Crowd, by James Cridland, on Flickr

Asking for contributions from the public, libraries and archives receive much needed man-power and collective knowledge from interested individuals to provide improved access to unique, historical collections.  Users volunteer their time and knowledge and gain highly interactive experiences. These are fun, social engagements because the website interfaces are great and the collections are interesting.

Browsing (and contributing) to some of these sites reminded me we’ve asked for our readers help on our own blog. We’ve had great conversations with and valuable contributions from our readers here, here and here.

I’ve been working on compiling a list of free, online resources that provide a good introduction to digital preservation geared for individuals.  We want a comprehensive list that will be valuable to assist librarians, archiving and information professionals who work with the public to gain knowledge and comfort with proving personal digital archiving information. Lisa Gregory recently blogged very well about discussing digital preservation with individuals while discussing the State Library of North Carolina’s tutorial on File Naming. (And this will be one of the resources on our list).

Here are some of the other resources on our list so far:

Digiman from Team Digital Preservation

• Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster (video)
• Digital Preservation Management: Implementing Short-term Strategies for Long-term Problems Tutorial
• The Fragility of Digital Materials
• I’m New to Digital Preservation: Digital Preservation Education for NC State Government Employees
• JISC Digital Media
• Paradigm Guidelines for Creators of Personal Archives
• Why is Digital Preservation Important for You (video)

So, readers, would you like to contribute to this growing list? Do you know of a resource that would be useful? We’d like to hear about it from you. Please comment here or drop us an email at ndiipp@loc.gov. Thanks!